Real Clouds

I’ve seen some increased social media activity around the subject of cloud computing from here in Istanbul this week, so I thought I would pass along some recent news on the cloud front at IBM.

Did you know that the average enterprise devotes up to 50 percent of its entire technology infrastructure to development and testing, but typically up to 90 percent of it remains idle?

Idle processors are the IT devil’s workshop!

What IBM has found is that taking advantage of cloud computing within development and testing environments can help reduce IT labor costs by 50 percent, and can improve quality and drastically reduce time to market for new applications.

IBM has certainly not been idle on the cloud front of late, ramping up its cloud focus with continued customer wins.

One such deal was in partnership with NISSAY Information Technology in Japan, which has partnered with IBM Japan to jointly build a cloud-based development and test environment to provide mission critical Web systems for Nippon Life Insurance.

The new cloud environment will allow NISSAY developers to procure new test and development environments in hours — a process that previously could take up to a month.

To prevent any impact on ongoing development projects and maintain test quality, NISSAY will maintain a traditional test environment that allocates resources in a fixed format. The new development and test environment uses IBM’s high performance UNIX server IBM Power Systems and the operational management software Tivoli Service Automation Manager.

The other was with the University of Bari (Universita di Bari) in Italy, which has selected an IBM System z mainframe as part of a cloud computing project to help local businesses, including fishermen, winemakers and trucking companies, adopt new business models.

The University of Bari is using an IBM System z mainframe and cloud approach as a test-bed for software, devices, services, laboratories and other technical instrumentation. 

This will allow multiple entities to tap into heavy-duty computing power at minimal cost and will lower the barrier to entry and help local businesses to benefit from this technology.

As an example, using a touch screen installed on fishing boats, local fishermen can immediately determine demand in local fish markets that on average handle 100 thousand tons of fish per year.

Directly from the boats, using simple touch screen systems, fisherman enter the type of fish caught just minutes ago and instantaneously start a virtual auction with wholesalers on the docks. 

If the auction price for a specific type of fish is too low, the fish can be thrown back or redirected to a nonprofit organization such as a soup kitchen. If the price is acceptable, the system automatically provides the necessary distribution between boxes to allow the fish to be packed before the boat arrives at the pier.

The University of Bari has also developed systems running on the IBM System z mainframe focused on wine production. 

Winemakers at up to 60 cooperative wineries are able to determine market demand for various types of wines by accessing the cloud computing-based systems, then package and ship wines demanding the highest price. 

The University of Bari is developing cloud-based solutions for southern Italy as part of the Daisy-Net consortium, which includes companies and universities from five regions of southern Italy. Daisy-Net researches, develops and provides transfer and training activities for new technologies in the information and communication technology sector and beyond.

The University of Bari cloud solution is built on an IBM System z9 Business Class mainframe running the Linux operating system, and includes DB2, WebSphere and Tivoli middleware from IBM.

You can visit here to learn more about IBM cloud computing.

IBM Pulse 2010: The Wide Shot

I’ve overcome my jetlag enough to produce this quick introductory video for IBM Pulse 2010 here in Vegas, complete with a few housekeeping details.

Due to the aforementioned jetlag, I was up well before most of the poker players had gone home for the night (not that I would know anything about such a thing), and early this AM IBM Pulse 2010 was already coming to life.

I’ve now got my badge, I kind of know my way around, and I am looking forward to running into some of you over the next few days.

In the meantime, enjoy your Sunday and for those of you still on your way to Vegas, safe travels (the weather is nice out, with a cool temp of around 48 degrees Fahrenheit and an expected high today of 61!)

Turbo Fa Milano

I arrived safely in Milan last evening, only to discover that Milan Fashion Week 2010 doesn’t begin for another 6 days!

My new line of cowboy-themed tie-die shirts, blue jeans, and cowboy hats seems to have been kept out of this year’s Milano lineup — I can’t be sure what, exactly, happened.

Did I inadvertently tick off Anna Wintour??

Perhaps it had something to do with my having worn a tie that didn’t match the color of my eyes.  It won’t have been the first time I committed a major fashion faux-pas while traveling abroad.

Though I’ll miss out on all the new Milano clothing lines, The Fashionisto blog will make sure you don’t miss a thing, no matter how short your high heels.

While I work to get my Texas fashion sense (such as it is) resituated, I had mentioned in a previous post the opportunities presented to organizations which focus on building out smarter business infrastructures.

This in anticipation of the IBM Pulse 2010 event next week in Las Vegas, which leads to some compelling questions you might want to ask yourself:

What would mean to your organization if you could always access critical business data at the exact moment you need it?

What if you could improve service and reduce costs by delivering IT services when your customers requested them?

Who knows, you might find yourself arriving in Milan for fashion week!

Especially in this challenging economic climate, companies around the globe have to manage and mitigate risk, even as they support their core business goals.

They have to address no small number of regulatory, organizational, and industry-oriented compliance drivers, and that alone can be a key inhibitor.

By way of example, 33% of consumers notified of a security breach will terminate their relationship with the company they perceive as responsible.

Doh!  Hold on, where’d all my customers go?!

71% of CIOs in a 2009 IBM Global CIO survey identified risk management and compliance as an important part of their visionary plans for enhanced competitiveness.

Can you spell Basel II?

And nearly 50% of all sensors used for critical measurements across production, facilities and transportation equipment are now smart sensors, generating up to 4 million signals daily — creating more information than ever before.

So many sensors, so little time!  Calgon, take me away!

Fear not.

Though it can’t help you with your fashion sense, IBM’s dynamic infrastructure strategy can help you deliver a shared, integrated and highly available infrastructure that can address these challenges today, but also capitalize on the opportunities of tomorrow.

It can help across a number of key areas:

• To enable visibility, control and automation across all business and IT assets through integrated service management
• To optimize the IT infrastructure through virtualization and energy efficiency initiatives to achieve more with less.
• To address the complexity of managing data growth through information infrastructure initiatives.

You can learn more about these opportunities in IBM Tivoli’s integrated service management podcasts and webcasts.

I would also suggest you visit our Smarter Cities Web experience, an excellent interactive overview of how IBM is helping drive adoption of smart and dynamic  infrastructures to facilitate everything from smarter traffic systems to smarter and more efficient energy grids. (Speaking of which, click hear to visit the IBM Energy Management blog!)

Me, I’ve got to manage my own energy and get back to this meeting in Milano…keep your fingers crossed for the Italian adoption of the Turbo Cowboy fashion line!

Building a Smarter Infrastructure

Though I’m attending a number of meetings throughout Europe this week, it’s not too early to start beating the drum for our IBM Pulse 2010 conference next week in Las Vegas.

Can you hear the drums all the way from here in Stuttgart!?  Dies ist gut!

Once again, I’ll be in Vegas for several days in a row to play some serious golf, finally take in that Cirques du Soleil show I’ve been putting off seeing, and try to qualify and become the first IBMer ever to win the World Series of Poker.

Uh, err, I mean, I’ll be on the scene in Vegas providing some social media air cover via this blog and the Twittersphere….no, really.

Since snow golf is out here in Stuttgart, I figured I would start setting the scene now.

If you’ve seen any of IBM’s smarter planet advertising, particularly the TV spots, you’ve probably seen them reference the idea of a more dynamic infrastructure.

What, exactly, do we mean by that?

Well, if you look at the three big ideas that help us build a smarter planet — instrument the world’s systems; interconnect them; and make them more intelligent — then you realize inherent in that instrumentation and interconnectivity is the need to know what’s going on with all those systems at all times, and to use their performance data to make actionable (and, hopefully, intelligent) business decisions.

That’s where service management for a dynamic infrastructure comes into play.

To put it more simply, think of your IT systems and infrastructure as the patient, and service management as the monitoring system.

You can’t the make patient better unless you can diagnose them and be able to understand what’s going on with them at any given moment.

A smarter infrastructure also means one that is dynamic, one that can respond quickly and dependably to changing conditions in the market and make the most use of your precious IT resources — but it must doing so while also being cognizant of and minimizing the costs to the environment (carbon footprint, electricity usage, etc.) and your organization (money spent on IT!).

By way of example, since 2006, IBM customer Fédération Française de Tennis (FFT), which runs the Roland Garros (French Open) tennis tournament annually, has seen a decrease of 40 percent in power consumption and of 48 percent of cooling load in its own IT infrastructure.

They’ve also created a “virtualized” infrastructure, one whereby they’ve minimized their server footprint from 60 to 6 over a three-year period.

Game, set, and match, right?

But a dynamic infrastructure doesn’t stop at the halls of IT, or courtside in Paris.

A smarter infrastructure is one that meets new requirements and opportunities: One that increases the accuracy of simulations and predictions by supporting more complex trending and analysis tools.  One that allows the integration of physical, chemical, biological, and even socioeconomic factors into modeling and analysis.

In other words, it’s not just about service levels anymore. Consumer expectations are higher than ever.

Take the world I live and breathe in, the wacky world of the Web, as an example: 33 percent of consumers shopping via a broadband connection will wait no more than four seconds for a Web page to render.

No pressure or anything.

So, the opportunity that a smarter and more dynamic infrastructure presents is simple: One that can help organizations meet both the risks and opportunities in an ever-more connected, collaborative electronic world.

That’s the wide shot.

In a future post, I’ll talk about the opportunity and avenues that organizations can pursue to take some initial steps towards building their own smarter infrastructure.

But for now, I have to get back to practicing my German.